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Subject: [GM-L] Unseen Neighbors: NIPMUC intermarriages with Anglo- Americans
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 16:48:03 EST

Recently someone asked for material re: Nipmucs.....here is a study:
(website below)

Unseen Neighbors: Native Americans of Central Massachusetts, A People Who Had
"Vanished" Other Northeastern Natives whose "migrations" into the area are
documented include: Narragansett-Niantic individuals and families from Rhode
Island into towns along the Blackstone River, like, for example, Joseph Noka,
of a prominent Charlestown political clan, living first with the Cisco family
at Grafton, years later marrying at Worcester. Some families were people from
southern Connecticut like the Nedsons; an eighteenth-century Pequot-Mohegan
Nedson whose uncle ran a school at Stonington married Nipmuc Mary Pegan;
their daughter Polly Nedson married Joseph Dorus, a Mahican, and
nineteenth-century Dorus family members married other Nipmucs in towns at
Massachusetts and Connecticut. Border. Other Native families in the area were
people from New York state, like the Burr and Jackson families, living in
Holland, West Brookfield and Sturbridge were, according to John M. Earle of a
chiefly family at Oneida. Still Indians from more even distant areas took up
residence Nipmuc homelands. Moreover, in 1900, when New York Indian claims
were being resolved in Congress, area Native people connected to Brothertown
unsuccessfully filed petitions for their families who had lived at
Brothertown to be part of financial settlement for lands taken in New York
State.

The practice of these and other families suggests "unseen" Native American
community dynamics. A characteristic extension of Indian families in the area
can be sketched across the Vickers family:

Natives of "Quineshepauge," the Nipmuc homelands of the Blackstone Valley
region, members of the Vickers family joined the Natick community in the
1730s, where they remained throughout the century, connected to towns
including Mendon, Medway, Medfield, Natick, Grafton and Upton. Christopher
Vickers, a son of Revolutionary War soldier Christopher Vickers, married Mary
Curless. In the first half of the nineteenth- century, thirteen children of
Mary Curless and Christopher Vickers were both at Burrillville, Rhode Island
and Thompson, Connecticut. Of six daughters: one married James Pegan at
Thompson where their family lived; another married a Nipmuc at the
reservation at Webster; a third moved to Worcester where she married,
eventually locating to Oxford; and another three daughters, each married
Nipmuc men at Worcester. Of their sons: five lived and raised families at
Oxford, one married a Woodstock Nipmuc, another married a Hampton,
Connecticut Native, a third marrying a Native from Burrillville; and fourth
son married a Native at Hampton, Connecticut.

In the next generation: grandson Edgar Pegan married a Columbia Connecticut
Native at Thompson; grandson Peleg Brown Jr., at Woodstock, married Nipmuc
sisters Ida Shelley and Hannah Nichols [daughters of Lydia Sprague]; grandson
Orin Vickers married cousin Emma Vickers, at Oxford, one of their sons, Edwin
Vickers, marrying Nipmuc Amanda Dorus; and another grandson, Charles K.
Vickers, married Woodstock-born Nipmuc Polly Dorus, whose children were born
at Sturbridge, including, for example, Charles Henry Elmer Vickers,
1887-1946, who married Orianna Hewitt, a daughter of Martha Dorus Hewitt, and
Samuel Vickers, who married at Woodstock, Nipmuc Alice Susan Dorus. A more
detailed discussion of this single family would demonstrate Native kinship
connections to virtually all of the towns of southern Worcester County and
northeastern Connecticut.

http://geocities.com/quinnips/history/unseen.html

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